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I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of

I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something simpler.

sz4kerto 1y ago
Or they consider themselves to have low(er) chance of winning. They could think either, but they obviously can't say the latter.
- bhouston 1y ago
  OpenAI is winning in a similar way that Apple is winning in smartphones. OpenAI is capturing most of the value in the space (generic LLM models), even though they have competitors who are beating them on price or capabilities. I think OpenAI may be able to maintain this position at least for the medium term because of their name recognition/prominence and they are still a fast mover. I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
  - screamingninja 1y ago
    > ban all non-US LLM providers What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.
    - slt2021 1y ago
      the bulk of money comes from enterprise users. Just need to call 500 CEOs from the S&P500 list, and enforce via "cyber data safety" enforcement via SEC or something like that. everyone will roll over if all large public companies roll over (and they will)
    - bhouston 1y ago
      I don't have to imagine. There are various US bills trying to achieve this ban. Here is one of them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/us_senator_download_chinese_ai_model/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/us_senator_download_c... One of them will eventually pass given that OpenAI is also pushing for protection: https://futurism.com/openai-ban-chinese-ai-deepseek https://futurism.com/openai-ban-chinese-ai-deepseek
    - babelfish 1y ago
      rather than coming up with a thorough definition, legislation will likely target individual companies (DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud, etc)
  - jjani 1y ago
    IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh). Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance. MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.
  - wincy 1y ago
    Companies that are contractors with the US government already aren’t allowed to use Deepseek even if its an airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal told us we can’t run any distills of it or anything. I think this is very dumb.
  - retrorangular 1y ago
    > I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons." Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them. If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making. For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't. But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.
  - pphysch 1y ago
    Switching between Apple and Google/Android ecosystems is expensive and painful. Switching from ChatGPT to the many competitors is neither expensive nor painful.
  - KerrAvon 1y ago
    Apple is not the right analogy. OpenAI has first mover advantage and they have a widely recognized brand name — ChatGPT — and that’s kind of it. Anyone (with very deep pockets) can buy Nvidia chips and go to town if they have a better or equivalent idea. There was a brief time (long before I was born) when “Univac” was synonymous with “computer.”
  - tim333 1y ago
    Big difference - Apple makes billions from smartphones, getting most of the industry's profits, which makes it hard to compete with. OpenAI loses billions and is at the mercy of getting new investors to fund the losses. It has many plausible competitors.
dingnuts 1y ago
to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that "winner takes all" barely covers it, I think. Admitting they will be in normal competition with other AI companies implies specializations and niches to compete, which means Artificial Specialized Intelligence, NOT general intelligence! and that makes complete sense if you don't have a lay person's understanding of the tech. Language models were never going to bring about "AGI." This is another nail in the coffin
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  That, or they don't care if they get to AGI first, and just want their payday now. Which sounds pretty in-line with the SV culture of putting profit above all else.
  - foobiekr 1y ago
    If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.
    - lenerdenator 1y ago
      Define "imminent". If I were a person like several of the people working on AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies), I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and just want to have a party at the end of the world. Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.
      - foobiekr 1y ago
        Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the individual equity holders this change is about." The window there would at _least_ include the next 5 years, though obviously not ten.
ignoramous 1y ago
> I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: Yeah; and: We want to open source very capable models. Seems like nary a daylight between DeepSeek R1, Sonnet 3.5, Gemini 2.5, & Grok3 really put things in perspective for them!
- kvetching 1y ago
  Not to mention, @Gork, aka Grok 3.5...
istjohn 1y ago
I'm not surprised that they found a reason to uncap their profits, but I wouldn't try to infer too much from the justification they cooked up.
- pdfernhout 1y ago
  As a deeper issue on "justification", here is something I wrote related to this in 2001 on the risks of non-profits engaging in self-dealing when they create artificial scarcity to enrich themselves: https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#is_it_self-dealing_to_exchange_public_property_for_salary https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#... "Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works. If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?" "Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. The trademark-infringing non-profit-sheltered project I mention above is as I see it in large part just a way to convert some government supported PhD thesis work and ongoing R&D grants into ready cash for the developers. Such "spin-offs" are actually encouraged by most funders. And frankly if that group eventually sells their software to a movie company, say, for a million dollars, who will really bat an eyebrow or complain? (They already probably get most of their revenue from similar sales anyway -- but just one copy at a time.) But how is this really different from the self-dealing of just selling charitably-funded software directly to Microsoft and distributing a lump sum? Just because "art" is somehow involved, does this make everything all right? To be clear, I am not concerned that the developers get paid well for their work and based on technical accomplishments they probably deserve that (even if we do compete for funds in a way). What I am concerned about is the way that the proprietary process happens such that the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work (other than a few publications without substantial source)." That said, charging to provide a service that costs money to supply (e.g. GPU compute) is not necessarily self-dealing. It is restricting the source code or using patents to create artificial scarcity around those services that could be seen that way.
lanthissa 1y ago
AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity. Not only is there infinite incentive to compete, but theres decreasing costs to. The only world in which AGI is winner take all is a world in which it is extremely controlled to the point at which the public cant query it.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago
  Nothing OpenAI is doing, or ever has done, has been close to AGI.
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    I agree with you, but that’s kindof beside the point. Open AI’s thesis is that they will work towards AGI, and eventually succeed. In the context of that premise, Open AI still doesn’t believe AGI would be winner-takes-all. I think that’s an interesting discussion whether you believe the premise or not.
    - Night_Thastus 1y ago
      If they're saying it's not 'winner takes all' it's cover to shield them from the fact that they aren't (or may not always be) in the top spot. They would not be saying that if they were undeniably the best - they'd say the opposite.
  - AndrewKemendo 1y ago
    I agree with you I wonder, do you have a hypothesis as to what would be a measurement that would differentiate AGI vs Not-AGI?
    - latentsea 1y ago
      When it can start wars over resources.
phreeza 1y ago
That is a very obvious thing for them to say though regardless of what they truly believe, because (a) it legitimizes removing the cap , making fundraising easier and (b) averts antitrust suspicions.
- selfselfgo 1y ago
  [dead]
- throwaway48476 1y ago
  (b) is true but no so much (a). If investors thought it would be winner take all and they thought ClosedAI would win they'd invest in ClosedAI only and starve competitors of funding.
  - sebastiennight 1y ago
    Actually I'm thinking in a winner-takes-all universe, the right strategy would be to spread your bets on as many likely winners as possible. That's literally the premise of venture capital. This is a scenario where we're assuming ALL our bets will go to zero, except one which will be worth trillions. In that case you should bet on everything. It's only in the opposite scenario (where every bet pays off with varying ROI) that it makes sense to go all-in on whichever bet seems most promising.
    - AbstractH24 1y ago
      Y that sounds just like a certain startup incubator’s perspective on things.
- pryce 1y ago
  > "Our for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)–a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission." One remarkable advantage of being a "Public Benefit Corporation" is this it: > prevent[s] shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation[1] In my view, it is their own shareholders that the directors of OpenAI are insulating themselves against. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
raincole 1y ago
Even if they think it will be a winner-take-all market, they won't say it out loud. It would be begging for antitrust lawsuits.
sensanaty 1y ago
Lmaoing at their casual use of AGI as if them or any of their competitors are anywhere near it.
- addandsubtract 1y ago
  If you change the definition of AGI, we're already there!
  - infairverona 1y ago
    Damn, didn't know my Casio FX-300 was AGI, good to know!
- DirkH 1y ago
  Proposition: Please promise to come back to this comment in 2030 and playfully mock me for ever being worried and I will buy you a coffee. If AGI is invented before 2030 please buy me one and let me mock you playfully.
jrvarela56 1y ago
Not saying this is OpenAI's case, but every monopolist claims they are not a monopolist...
hliyan 1y ago
There needs to be regulations about deceptive, indirect, purposefully ambiguous or vague public communication by corporations (or any entity). I'm not an expert in corporate law or finance, but the statement should be: "Open AI for-profit LLC will become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)" followed by: "Profit cap is hereby removed" and finally "The Open AI non-profit will continue to control the PBC. We intend it to be a significant shareholder of the PBC."
zeroq 1y ago
"It's not you, it's me."
huijzer 1y ago
The value investor Mohnish Pabrai once talked about his observation that most companies with a moat pretend they don’t have one and companies without pretend they do.
- Takennickname 1y ago
  I don't know how I feel about a tech bro being credit for an idea like this. This is originally from The Art of War.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    Mohnish isn't a tech bro though, in my books. After selling his company, guy retreated away from the tech scene to get into Buffett-style value investing. And if you read his book, it's about glorifying the small businessmen running motels and garages, who invest bit by bit into the stock market.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    It's a specific observation that matches some very general advice from The Art of War, it's not like it's a direct quote from it.
- anshumankmr 1y ago
  Its quite true. The closest thing to a moat OpenAI has is the memory feature.
- monkeyelite 1y ago
  A version of this is emphasized in the thielverse as well. Companies in heavy competition try to intersect all their qualities to appear unique. Dominant companies talk about their portfolio of side projects to appear in heavy competition (space flight, ed tech, etc).
whiplash451 1y ago
I read this line as : we were completely off the chart from a corp structure standpoint. We need to get closer to the norm and give shares of a for-profit to employees in order to create retention.
coryfklein 1y ago
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” ― Sun Tzu
burnte 1y ago
The level of arrogance needed to think they'd be the only company to come up with AI/AGI is staggering.
rlt 1y ago
“Fine, we’ll keep the non-profit, but we’re going to extract the fuck out of the for-profit” Quite the arc from the original organization.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

sz4kerto 1y ago

Or they consider themselves to have low(er) chance of winning. They could think either, but they obviously can't say the latter.

bhouston 1y ago
OpenAI is winning in a similar way that Apple is winning in smartphones. OpenAI is capturing most of the value in the space (generic LLM models), even though they have competitors who are beating them on price or capabilities. I think OpenAI may be able to maintain this position at least for the medium term because of their name recognition/prominence and they are still a fast mover. I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
- screamingninja 1y ago
  > ban all non-US LLM providers What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.
  - slt2021 1y ago
    the bulk of money comes from enterprise users. Just need to call 500 CEOs from the S&P500 list, and enforce via "cyber data safety" enforcement via SEC or something like that. everyone will roll over if all large public companies roll over (and they will)
  - bhouston 1y ago
    I don't have to imagine. There are various US bills trying to achieve this ban. Here is one of them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/us_senator_download_chinese_ai_model/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/us_senator_download_c... One of them will eventually pass given that OpenAI is also pushing for protection: https://futurism.com/openai-ban-chinese-ai-deepseek https://futurism.com/openai-ban-chinese-ai-deepseek
  - babelfish 1y ago
    rather than coming up with a thorough definition, legislation will likely target individual companies (DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud, etc)
- jjani 1y ago
  IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh). Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance. MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.
- wincy 1y ago
  Companies that are contractors with the US government already aren’t allowed to use Deepseek even if its an airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal told us we can’t run any distills of it or anything. I think this is very dumb.
- retrorangular 1y ago
  > I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons." Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them. If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making. For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't. But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.
- pphysch 1y ago
  Switching between Apple and Google/Android ecosystems is expensive and painful. Switching from ChatGPT to the many competitors is neither expensive nor painful.
- KerrAvon 1y ago
  Apple is not the right analogy. OpenAI has first mover advantage and they have a widely recognized brand name — ChatGPT — and that’s kind of it. Anyone (with very deep pockets) can buy Nvidia chips and go to town if they have a better or equivalent idea. There was a brief time (long before I was born) when “Univac” was synonymous with “computer.”
- tim333 1y ago
  Big difference - Apple makes billions from smartphones, getting most of the industry's profits, which makes it hard to compete with. OpenAI loses billions and is at the mercy of getting new investors to fund the losses. It has many plausible competitors.

dingnuts 1y ago

to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that "winner takes all" barely covers it, I think. Admitting they will be in normal competition with other AI companies implies specializations and niches to compete, which means Artificial Specialized Intelligence, NOT general intelligence! and that makes complete sense if you don't have a lay person's understanding of the tech. Language models were never going to bring about "AGI." This is another nail in the coffin

lenerdenator 1y ago
That, or they don't care if they get to AGI first, and just want their payday now. Which sounds pretty in-line with the SV culture of putting profit above all else.
- foobiekr 1y ago
  If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    Define "imminent". If I were a person like several of the people working on AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies), I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and just want to have a party at the end of the world. Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.
    - foobiekr 1y ago
      Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the individual equity holders this change is about." The window there would at _least_ include the next 5 years, though obviously not ten.

ignoramous 1y ago

> I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: Yeah; and: We want to open source very capable models. Seems like nary a daylight between DeepSeek R1, Sonnet 3.5, Gemini 2.5, & Grok3 really put things in perspective for them!

kvetching 1y ago
Not to mention, @Gork, aka Grok 3.5...

istjohn 1y ago

I'm not surprised that they found a reason to uncap their profits, but I wouldn't try to infer too much from the justification they cooked up.

pdfernhout 1y ago
As a deeper issue on "justification", here is something I wrote related to this in 2001 on the risks of non-profits engaging in self-dealing when they create artificial scarcity to enrich themselves: https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#is_it_self-dealing_to_exchange_public_property_for_salary https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#... "Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works. If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?" "Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. The trademark-infringing non-profit-sheltered project I mention above is as I see it in large part just a way to convert some government supported PhD thesis work and ongoing R&D grants into ready cash for the developers. Such "spin-offs" are actually encouraged by most funders. And frankly if that group eventually sells their software to a movie company, say, for a million dollars, who will really bat an eyebrow or complain? (They already probably get most of their revenue from similar sales anyway -- but just one copy at a time.) But how is this really different from the self-dealing of just selling charitably-funded software directly to Microsoft and distributing a lump sum? Just because "art" is somehow involved, does this make everything all right? To be clear, I am not concerned that the developers get paid well for their work and based on technical accomplishments they probably deserve that (even if we do compete for funds in a way). What I am concerned about is the way that the proprietary process happens such that the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work (other than a few publications without substantial source)." That said, charging to provide a service that costs money to supply (e.g. GPU compute) is not necessarily self-dealing. It is restricting the source code or using patents to create artificial scarcity around those services that could be seen that way.

lanthissa 1y ago

AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity. Not only is there infinite incentive to compete, but theres decreasing costs to. The only world in which AGI is winner take all is a world in which it is extremely controlled to the point at which the public cant query it.

Night_Thastus 1y ago
Nothing OpenAI is doing, or ever has done, has been close to AGI.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  I agree with you, but that’s kindof beside the point. Open AI’s thesis is that they will work towards AGI, and eventually succeed. In the context of that premise, Open AI still doesn’t believe AGI would be winner-takes-all. I think that’s an interesting discussion whether you believe the premise or not.
  - Night_Thastus 1y ago
    If they're saying it's not 'winner takes all' it's cover to shield them from the fact that they aren't (or may not always be) in the top spot. They would not be saying that if they were undeniably the best - they'd say the opposite.
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  I agree with you I wonder, do you have a hypothesis as to what would be a measurement that would differentiate AGI vs Not-AGI?
  - latentsea 1y ago
    When it can start wars over resources.

phreeza 1y ago

That is a very obvious thing for them to say though regardless of what they truly believe, because (a) it legitimizes removing the cap , making fundraising easier and (b) averts antitrust suspicions.

selfselfgo 1y ago
[dead]
throwaway48476 1y ago
(b) is true but no so much (a). If investors thought it would be winner take all and they thought ClosedAI would win they'd invest in ClosedAI only and starve competitors of funding.
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  Actually I'm thinking in a winner-takes-all universe, the right strategy would be to spread your bets on as many likely winners as possible. That's literally the premise of venture capital. This is a scenario where we're assuming ALL our bets will go to zero, except one which will be worth trillions. In that case you should bet on everything. It's only in the opposite scenario (where every bet pays off with varying ROI) that it makes sense to go all-in on whichever bet seems most promising.
  - AbstractH24 1y ago
    Y that sounds just like a certain startup incubator’s perspective on things.
pryce 1y ago
> "Our for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)–a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission." One remarkable advantage of being a "Public Benefit Corporation" is this it: > prevent[s] shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation[1] In my view, it is their own shareholders that the directors of OpenAI are insulating themselves against. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

raincole 1y ago

Even if they think it will be a winner-take-all market, they won't say it out loud. It would be begging for antitrust lawsuits.

sensanaty 1y ago

Lmaoing at their casual use of AGI as if them or any of their competitors are anywhere near it.

addandsubtract 1y ago
If you change the definition of AGI, we're already there!
- infairverona 1y ago
  Damn, didn't know my Casio FX-300 was AGI, good to know!
DirkH 1y ago
Proposition: Please promise to come back to this comment in 2030 and playfully mock me for ever being worried and I will buy you a coffee. If AGI is invented before 2030 please buy me one and let me mock you playfully.

jrvarela56 1y ago

Not saying this is OpenAI's case, but every monopolist claims they are not a monopolist...

hliyan 1y ago

There needs to be regulations about deceptive, indirect, purposefully ambiguous or vague public communication by corporations (or any entity). I'm not an expert in corporate law or finance, but the statement should be: "Open AI for-profit LLC will become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)" followed by: "Profit cap is hereby removed" and finally "The Open AI non-profit will continue to control the PBC. We intend it to be a significant shareholder of the PBC."

zeroq 1y ago

"It's not you, it's me."

huijzer 1y ago

The value investor Mohnish Pabrai once talked about his observation that most companies with a moat pretend they don’t have one and companies without pretend they do.

Takennickname 1y ago
I don't know how I feel about a tech bro being credit for an idea like this. This is originally from The Art of War.
- fakedang 1y ago
  Mohnish isn't a tech bro though, in my books. After selling his company, guy retreated away from the tech scene to get into Buffett-style value investing. And if you read his book, it's about glorifying the small businessmen running motels and garages, who invest bit by bit into the stock market.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  It's a specific observation that matches some very general advice from The Art of War, it's not like it's a direct quote from it.
anshumankmr 1y ago
Its quite true. The closest thing to a moat OpenAI has is the memory feature.
monkeyelite 1y ago
A version of this is emphasized in the thielverse as well. Companies in heavy competition try to intersect all their qualities to appear unique. Dominant companies talk about their portfolio of side projects to appear in heavy competition (space flight, ed tech, etc).

whiplash451 1y ago

I read this line as : we were completely off the chart from a corp structure standpoint. We need to get closer to the norm and give shares of a for-profit to employees in order to create retention.

coryfklein 1y ago

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” ― Sun Tzu

burnte 1y ago

The level of arrogance needed to think they'd be the only company to come up with AI/AGI is staggering.

rlt 1y ago

“Fine, we’ll keep the non-profit, but we’re going to extract the fuck out of the for-profit” Quite the arc from the original organization.

deleted 1y ago

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